


penance

by Anonymous



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Ardyn Izunia Backstory, Buried Alive, Capital Punishment, Claustrophobia, Desperation, Force-Feeding, Gen, Homophobic Language, Humiliation, Imprisonment, M/M, Non-Consensual Oral Sex, Psychological Torture, Restraints, Self-Harm, Starvation, Verse 2 Ending, autocannibalism, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-05 11:34:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15169874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “...and for the above so stated crimes, I sentence you to imprisonment for the remainder of your natural life, with no possibility of release.”Ardyn sets his jaw. After all this, he is still just a thing, one to be filed away and put in a box and forgotten about, not even worthy of a clean death to end it all.“Do you understand this sentence as it has been passed down to you?”Ardyn inhales sharply, straightens his spine, and looks Noctis in the eye. “Yes, Your Majesty.”Hurt people hurt people. And Ardyn's had two millennia to hurt.





	1. the window

**Author's Note:**

> Started off as a kmeme fill but with recent happenings I'm moving this here.
> 
> Tags and warnings to be updated as the story progresses.

Noctis’ throne room certainly is splendid.

Ardyn was well aware that the seat of the line had, of course, been rebuilt several times throughout the dynasty, and this, although still under construction as the Citadel is renovated in the wake of Insomnia’s restoration, was a far, far cry from his brother’s first great hall, of the converted senate. This is all gleaming marble, white and grey and gold, brightly lit and regaling in its splendor.

Ardyn currently stands before the throne, Noctis seated upon it, with Luna beside him─who was to know that they would both survive Altissia, and then the coming of the dawn? In an odd way, Ardyn is mildly relieved to see them both there, and took a strange sort of comfort in knowing they, at least, defied their fate and beat Bahamut at his own game.

They both look bored, and perhaps they are, perhaps the return to a semblance of normalcy after everything they’ve been through is too tame for their liking now, even with the city still left to rebuild and a world to lead. But they look well, better than he does, Luna dressed in an eloquent white and blue gown, Noctis in his staple black suit, his beard not shaved but rather neatly trimmed.

Ardyn, too, had been stripped of the Scourge, left without the thousands of voices crying in his skull and the miasma dripping from him. He’d woken up in the moments after their encounter, staring up at a sky ebbing purple and pink with the coming dawn, a sight he hadn’t seen in a decade, and wondering if this were finally the afterlife. Noctis had been beside him, struggling on the line between life and death, and Ardyn had laid his hands on him, surprised to find that the gifts he had been blessed with two thousand years ago still _worked_ as he eased a steady rhythm from Noctis’ heart.

And then they’d grabbed him, dragged him away, chained and shackled him and threw him in some back room of the Citadel to deal with when they saw fit.

Today he’s been finally hauled out after weeks of sitting in a solitary closet, paraded before the small, small audience here. Aside from Noct and Luna, they’re joined only by his retainers, the Marshal, and Ravus, all of them near the dais. Mortality is still new, raw and fresh, and odd, and Ardyn finds himself both fascinated and overwhelmed by the new sensations, like the firm marble under his feet, or how the Citadel is always a little too cold for his liking as he was marched through its halls.

Ardyn shifts as Noctis continues reading, the chain joining his cuffs clinking softly. Noctis won’t even stand to pass sentence, which Ardyn finds rather rude, and knows is deliberate, but he says nothing, just keeps his eyes trained on the dais as Noctis finishes reading.

“...and for the above so stated crimes, I sentence you to imprisonment for the remainder of your natural life, with no possibility of release.”

Ardyn sets his jaw. After all this, he is still just a thing, one to be filed away and put in a box and forgotten about, not even worthy of a clean death to end it all.

“Do you understand this sentence as it has been passed down to you?”

Ardyn inhales sharply, straightens his spine, and looks Noctis in the eye. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

\---

The cell is, at least, quiet.

Ardyn had half-expected Noctis to sentence him to labor, to force him to rebuild the city he’d destroyed a decade ago, but no, Noctis intends to keep him from the public eye. That was probably for the best, Ardyn thinks, wondering just what kind of a lynch mob would appear should the news of his survival and imprisonment be made public.

There certainly had been ones in the past.

He’s surprised when Cor leads him down a different path than the one they came from, taking him to a different spot than the converted storage room that had been his cell for the last month. Along the way he marvels at the reconstruction, at the scaffolding in parts, the men working to put all the pieces back together and replace those gone missing, but Cor urges him along, unwilling to let Ardyn dawdle.

Cor takes him down through a maze of hallways and a long elevator ride, and finally brings him to a bare, white room, in the basement of the Citadel (or, well, what remains of it). The door is steel, with a glass plate as thick as the width of a man’s hand in the center, giving a clear view of most of the inside. It’s hardly furnished, but then again, it’s a cell, not a luxury suite. A bed, a toilet, and a few pipes that run from the ceiling to the floor along the back wall are the only things in the room, and although he’d like a distraction, Ardyn knows he wouldn’t get one.

The bed has no sheets, and Ardyn knows, cynically, it’s so he won’t hang himself. Noctis clearly wants him to suffer, believing that fifty odd years in a white room will matter after the two thousand he’s already spent wandering this forsaken ball of dirt, serving a sentence for the crime of charity.

The Marshal unlocks the massive glass and steel door, tugs Ardyn inside with little grace, and Ardyn does stumble awkwardly. He’s taking stock of his new surroundings as Cor unlocks his cuffs, pulling the manacles away and taking them with as he leaves the room. Ardyn hears the door lock, but doesn’t turn to look; he knows all he’ll find is white cinderblock wall and Cor’s face on the other side of the glass.

Instead he stands in the center of the room, looking up to the tiny, rectangular window at the top of the back wall, his only connection to the outside world, his only reminder that anything _exists_ beyond these four walls.

He spends the first hour of his sentence staring at that window.

\---

_Ardyn thinks that window may be the only thing keeping him sane._

_His cell is nearly bare, lacking a bed, any kind of comforts, furnished with just a clay pot to be used as a latrine. Somnus is taking no chances with his housing, so there aren’t any objects that Ardyn could use to harm himself or take his own life. Ardyn’s execution has been scheduled for an auspicious day under the full moon, predicted by the priests and the augurs, and Somnus will see that he arrives there, and in good condition, too._

_He’s slated to die for heresy, for treason, for perversion, for a slew of other crimes he was forced to confess to under torture, but mostly, he knows, he’s slated to die because Somnus and the others are afraid, of him, of what he can do, and of what he might become._

_Ardyn can hardly blame them._

_Though Somnus has seen that Ardyn is safely secured in his cell, he reasons that he just might die of boredom before his slated execution date. He has nothing but his thoughts to keep him company, really, no distractions of any kind, and he spent the first three days locked in here screaming and railing at the walls, angry, sobbing, afraid of his own impending death._

_Eventually, the inevitability of it all sank in, and by the time Gilgamesh is allowed to see him--briefly, under supervision--Ardyn feels both empty and resigned. Their visit is amicable, more upbeat than it should be and not plagued by Ardyn’s impending doom, ending in a kiss through iron bars, and Ardyn knows it’s the last one he’ll ever get the moment they part._

_But most days, all he has is the window for a distraction, for a tether of any kind._

_Outside, he can hear the birds singing in the early morning, and the occasional voice, sometimes footsteps if they’re particularly loud. There’s a ledge above the window, so on the day when it rains, when thunder and lightning tear the sky asunder, Ardyn can hear the rainfall but none of it splashes into his cell. On bright days, he watches the rectangular slash of light move like a golden snail across the room, inching ever so slowly from sunup to sundown._

_The cell is always guarded, by some silent, stoic soldier, and the face is just about the only thing that differs from guard to guard, posted outside his cell to watch him, day and night. They’re all brusque, rough men, no doubt hand picked by Somnus from his legions, sent here to ensure that Ardyn doesn’t find a way to end his life on his own terms, as well as protect him from those who might seek to end his life on_ their _terms._

_Some of the men leer at him. One spits on him when he thinks Ardyn isn’t paying attention. Others rattle the bars of his cell when he starts to doze, keeping him awake. Another eats half of Ardyn’s ration, spits in the rest, and slides it in to his cell. Ardyn is slightly frightened of them, but he knows that none of them will cause him serious harm. Somnus would have them scourged should they even try._

_But there’s one who makes Ardyn’s skin prickle, twists his stomach into knots of dread, stills the breath in his chest out of fear. It’s genuine, and this man has the cold stare of a hungry dog whenever his eyes settle on Ardyn. There’s a particular cruelty there that Ardyn can sense, rolling off this man in thick waves, and every time he takes up a shift Ardyn spends the whole time sitting against the wall, looking at anything and everything except this man._

_He comes up on one cloudy morning, and Ardyn realizes he should’ve taken the weather as a sign his day was only going to get worse. The moment they’re left alone in the block Ardyn turns slightly, sitting against one of the side walls of his cell, and he looks up to the window, imagining the goings-ons of the passers by outside._

_“Heard some talk from the boys. They all say you’re a cocksucker,” the guard says, breaking the silence, and Ardyn blinks once in shock. “Big rumor that you were shacked up with that fuckin’ foreign behemoth your brother has. That true?”_

_Ardyn doesn’t say anything. He flinches as the soldier hits the metal door with his sword, the resulting_ clang _echoing around his cell and the ones nearby._

_“Is it?”_

_Ardyn still keeps quiet, pulling his knees into his chest. He won’t sully Gilgamesh and admit their relationship now, days from his death. Let it remain a secret as it always had been. Gilgamesh was the best thing to ever happen to Ardyn, and the memories of the time he spent with Gilgamesh are the only comfort Ardyn has now, so Ardyn won’t give this grunt the satisfaction he seeks in his efforts to get a rise out of him._

_He jerks when the man grabs the door and rattles it. “Well, is it?”_

_Ardyn sets his jaw, fisting a handful of his robes as he scoots a bit more towards the far corner. The manacles chaining his wrists together clink softly, and Ardyn eyes the chain that connects them to a ring in the center of the cell._

_The guard laughs, more of a barking sound than anything conveying mirth, and Ardyn’s pulse quickens. “Guess it must be true, then,” the guard snarls. “Can’t even be bothered to deny it.”_

_Ardyn lowers his gaze, staring at his own ankles, suddenly feeling more ashamed than ever. He quickly loses himself to guilty, acerbic thoughts, and is only pulled from them when the guard leaves his cell to peer out into the adjoining hallway._

_Ardyn’s watching when he returns, undoing the lock on the door with a thick iron key. The tumblers clank and then stop, and the silence hangs in the air, eerie and foreboding. A creak pierces the air as the guard pushes the door open, and Ardyn can’t hide his nervous grimace he watches the guard step inside. Instead he grips his robes tighter to hide his shaking._

_It does him little good when the guard picks up the chain at the center of the room and tugs it so hard Ardyn loses balance, turning half onto his side and his stomach as he’s yanked across the floor and pulled from the corner. Ardyn scrabbles back, but he’s pulled out again by the chain, and this time the guard grabs a hold of him, at the neck and shoulder, and lifts Ardyn just a bit before slamming him into the stone floor._

_“There’s nowhere for you to go, so don’t fight now,” he says, Ardyn struggling to make sense of his words as reels. His vision is nothing but stars of pain set against a gray backdrop as he tries to focus, and he can feel blood running down from his nose and curling around his upper lip. Before he can right himself, the guard snags the chain again, using it to haul Ardyn to his knees, hands in front of him, and he closes the space between them, still holding the chain._

_“You miss sucking his cock?” he asks, a venomous sweetness in his voice, like he’s doing Ardyn a favor even as Ardyn’s blood turns to ice. “I bet you do.”_

_Ardyn tries to turn away, but the guard fists a hand in his long, red locks and viciously snaps his head back, dropping the chain to instead manipulate Ardyn via his hair. He tries to pull away, straining his neck, but instead he’s kept firmly in place, forced to watch as this guard undoes the bindings on his trousers, drawing his cock out with one hand._

_“Well, don’t worry, I’ll fix that for ‘ya.”_

_This isn’t happening, he thinks. This is just a nightmare, too surreal to be any permutation of reality, Ardyn tells himself as he watches the guard stroke himself to hardness. He wants to wake up, end this whole ordeal, just be left back alone in his cell. He doesn’t even need any comforts, he just needs to be away from this man. He could try and fight, he thinks, but he’s chained here, his face still a mess of pain from moments earlier, and he knows this guard won’t be above causing Ardyn more hurt to get what he wants._

_His cock is hard in a matter of moments, and Ardyn’s stomach is a pit of anxiety, tense, as the guard lines himself up, squeezing the head of his cock, inches from Ardyn’s face. “You know what to do with this,” he says, part instruction, part veiled threat, and Ardyn’s insides lurch._

_“Go on,” he coos. “Suck it like you did his. I know you love it. All you boyfuckers do.”_

_Ardyn looks up with horrified, pleading eyes, slowly shaking his head from side to side. He wants to say a million things, anything from just_ No _to_ Please _to_ I can’t, _but nothing comes out, nothing but a frustrated, frightened whine. The guard’s other hand grabs his jaw, squeezing, and Ardyn claws at him, desperate, but then the hand in his hair tightens, and the grip on his face becomes bruising, ready to snap._

_“Fight me and I’ll smash all your pretty little teeth in,” he hisses, and his tone is enough to send a shiver down Ardyn’s spine. Reluctantly, Ardyn parts his lips, lets this guard push his cock past his lips and everything about it feels_ vile. _Ardyn trembles as the guard slowly starts to thrust into his mouth, trying not to gag, fighting tooth and nail to keep his composure together._

_“See, there you go,” the guard grunts, pulling Ardyn down onto his cock. “Knew you fucking loved this.”_

_He feels ashamed, down to his core, remembering all the times he’d done this as an act of intimacy with Gilgamesh. Now he’s being used and mocked, but there’s nowhere for him to go, no point to struggle, and so Ardyn goes limp, letting his humiliation sweep over him in a strong wave. He doesn’t fight, instead letting this man manipulate him, steering Ardyn via the hand tangled in his hair._

_There’s a deep chuckle from the guard as he settles into a rhythm. “You take cock like you were meant for it,” he laughs. “No wonder that fucking barbarian was sweet on you.”_

_The only small mercy in it all is that it’s over quickly. Ardyn lets his jaw go slack, shutting his eyes fiercely, and lets the guard fuck his mouth. It’s rough, and he’s quickly choking and sputtering as the guard’s cock hits the back of his throat with each jerky thrust, but he endures, digging his nails into the heel of his palm to distract himself, listening to the hammering of his heart in his ears and the awkward, harsh pants of the guard above him. When the guard pulls back and draws his cock from Ardyn’s mouth, Ardyn’s jaw aching, he breathes a sigh of relief, even as the guard still keeps him in place with one hand painfully twisted in his hair. Now he just sits, still, as the guard strokes himself a final few times, and then there’s hot finish splashing across his face, Ardyn flinching in response, squeezing his eyes tightly shut._

_Only once the guard is thoroughly finished, his release painted over Ardyn’s face, a crown to his portrait of shame, does he let Ardyn go, releasing his hold on Ardyn’s hair. Ardyn goes slack, sitting back on his heels, stunned, dazed, his jaw aching, a dull nausea welling up in him. He doesn’t want to cry, he wants to dig a hole in the center of his cell and crawl into it, let the masons pave it over and bury him and his humiliation._

_He doesn’t move, doesn’t react as the guard ruffles his hair in a perversely affectionate manner, still just kneeling, taking his little hiccup breaths, too afraid and shocked to even get his thoughts in any kind of a coherent fashion. Only as the guard steps away from him, pulling open the door to his cell once more as he leaves, does Ardyn look up, his stare dead and jaded and hollow._

_Everything crashes in all at once, crumbing like decrepit city walls under siege, and Ardyn is shaken not only by the realization of just what’s happened to him, but of his impending demise, of how he’s been ripped away from everything he treasured, of how in a few days he’ll be stripped and whipped and nailed to a few planks and strung up in front of everyone to die, in front of the one man he treasures above everything. He’s broken, he’s always been broken and perverted and twisted, never deserved any kindness, and now he’s being punished for it, punished for who he is and who he loved, and then he’ll be tossed away._

_But still there aren’t tears, and Ardyn just sits, staring blankly at the stones on the floor of his cell, his cage, as the sun crawls across the sky and the light fades out from his window._


	2. the door

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: Now with lovely art gifted from an incredibly talented anon!
> 
> Full version is [here](https://my.mixtape.moe/kupdip.jpg), and detail shot is available [here.](https://my.mixtape.moe/phomwl.jpg)

The door vexes him.

Ardyn sighs, staring at his own reflection in the glass once more, sitting on the floor directly across from the door. He thinks how easily he would’ve removed it before, cut through it with a snap of his fingers and reduced the whole thing to powder and scraps of twisted metal, stepped over all of it and walked without hesitation towards freedom.

But now he’s here. Trapped. Sealed in this little cubicle, an animal held back by a few inches of glass.

He’s not really sure what he would _do_ with his freedom if he had it, but Ardyn is still furious with the fact that the choice has been taken from him, his life now dictated by _children_ masquerading as adults. But he resigns himself with the thought that in a few odd decades it won’t matter; Noctis can protect him from outside dangers and even from himself, but he’s powerless to prevent death’s touch on Ardyn.

For his first three days, Ardyn screams and shouts and beat the door, but there was no one to hear him, no one in the chamber outside his cell, and his cries only echoed around his prison. Twice a day an unnamed, faceless guard off a rotation comes down to slide food through a slat in the steel portion of the bottom of the door, but he seems to pay no mind to Ardyn’s affairs, or if he does, he clearly doesn’t have any objection to them. Regardless, Ardyn keeps yelling until his voice gives out, cracked and painful, until even conjuring a whisper is painful, and then he switches to a physical assault, kicking and banging on the plate glass.

His clothes have long been swapped out for scrubs, cream colored, short sleeved and loose, with slip on, rubber soled sneakers to complete the ensemble. The sneakers are torn off, used to smack the glass until one of them cracks in two, and then Ardyn grows more and more desperate, slamming his body at the shoulder into the glass, colliding with it, over and over and over, just wanting that glass to _budge._ He’ll test every aspect of this box, find any fault it has, because Noctis has given him nothing else to do.

The slams last until he strikes the door at an odd angle, and his collarbone snaps, white hot, awful, electric pain racing through him. Two millennia of a supernatural existence have dulled his memories of _pain,_ of real, mortal pain, but here it is, fresh and raw and ugly, and Ardyn is sobbing on the floor of his cell a few moments later, unable to process all of the sensations.

He sits on his heels until his tears dry, and ironically, one of the guards comes down to slide food through the slot. Ardyn watches it, sitting in a crumpled heap on his heels, the tray bumping his knee as it enters the cell.

The door hasn’t budged. It’s not going to budge, Ardyn knows, not by any of his mortal means. He can keep going, keep flinging himself at it, hit it until his knuckles are bloody, claw at it until he rips his fingertips open, but it will still be there, glass and steel cutting him off from the rest of the world. Such a display would no doubt attract the attention of others, and Ardyn knows Noctis would have no issue throwing him in a straitjacket or immobilizing him for the rest of his sentence.

_Better not to push it_ , he thinks, and slips his hand under the neck of his shirt to heal his collarbone. He watches his reflection, closes his eyes for a moment as the bones snap back into place (always a terrible sensation) and when he opens them, he’s still staring back at himself, his image held in the very glass that also traps him.

\---

_Ardyn wakes to blackness._

_He can feel something over him, gauzy, and as he blinks, waiting for his eyes to adjust, he realizes it’s linen, draped over all of him._

_A shroud. A funerary shroud._

_The realization settles low in his gut as the other memories drift forth, pulled up and pushed forth by voices, ever circling, a sinister whisper in his ear. He remembers pain, wracking every nerve in his body, bearing down on him, remembers struggling to breathe, each cycle of inhale and exhale an ordeal, wondering which one would be his last._

_Evidently one had been._

_Twisting, Ardyn tries to reach up for the shroud, his hands wracked by pain, fingers twisted._ The nails, _he remembers, vivid images flashing in his mind, staring down his arm as a faceless soldier hammers them in to his wrists, his fingers curling as something_ snaps _in his hand._

_Panicked, Ardyn sits up, breath coming in short little pants, and the shroud falls forward. He lays his crippled hands in his lap─though the nails are gone, the holes remain, two black, ugly divots, barely visible in the low, silver light of the─_

_─of the tomb._

_He’s in a tomb. He’s dead, or he was dead, he died up on that cross, and they─someone─took him down and put him here._

_The ground is firm beneath him, and Ardyn puts his hands out, trying to feel for walls. He wants to stand, but as he draws in his legs pain arcs through him, and Ardyn can feel something foreign lodged in his ankles. Pawing at the shroud with his mangled hands, he pulls it free, revealing his thin legs, each one bearing another thick, black, iron nail driven through the ankle._

_Ardyn feels woozy now, unable to process this, and the voices that had been a whisper suddenly explode into laughter, shrill and shrieking. More memories burst forth, memories of denial, the word_ impure _hurled at him, twisted, sick, tainted─_

_He buries his face in his palms, fingers still curled, and chokes back a sob. He’s here in this tomb because Death has rejected him, because even Death has deemed him too corrupted to take. Ardyn can’t hold back the next sob, and it slips free, an alien, awful, inhuman noise from a voice rusty with disuse._

_The voices swirl and swell, excited now, and Ardyn knows what they are, what_ it _is, the same blackness that has stained his tears and his soul. He can feel them chewing, gnawing, urging him to give himself over, to surrender to them, and Ardyn, in his panic, almost gives in._

_He can feel the wounds in his wrists healing, and he looks down in horror and shock as the black wounds seal themselves, as the dessicated flesh of his arms firms and fills out, rejuvenated. Pain radiates out from his ankles, and Ardyn looks to the nails. Shaking, but now in command of fingers that work, he reaches for one, bracing his leg with his free hand as he grips the nail, and then pulls._

_It’s horrible. He lets out a dry scream, a rasping noise, as the nail comes free, sliding through flesh and past bones. Ardyn grits his teeth and pulls harder until it’s free, loose in his hand, a spike as long as a man’s hand. Still reeling, Ardyn stares at it, and then looks back to his ankle, the wound now closing up._

_In a flurry he does the other nail, the gaping hole filling in, flesh smoothing out and over, leaving a purple scar in its wake. Ardyn drops the nails like they’re scalding, scrabbling backwards, as if trying to get away from some creature, knocking brass cups and plates and other things aside, but he knows what he really fears is himself, what he’s become, and there’s no escaping that._

_His back hits the wall quickly, and Ardyn uses it to pull himself to his feet. There’s dust over everything, over him, the shroud, the floor, the kind of dust that only accumulates after years, and Ardyn wonders how long he’s been down here, a renewed sense of dread settling at the bottom of his stomach._

_On unsteady legs, like that of a newborn foal (or newly resurrected) Ardyn walks the perimeter of the tomb, one hand skimming along the wall as he moves about. It’s dark, hard to see, but Ardyn can parse out that it’s about eight paces wide by five across, some kind of little cave._

_At the center is the shroud, surrounded by the plates and cups he’s knocked over in his hysteria, the things left for him to ensure a comfortable journey to the beyond. Some good they’d done him, Ardyn thinks darkly, feeling around the last bits of the wall._

_But deep down he knows that only one person would lay him down here with such things, and the thought of Gilgamesh carrying his body here to lay him to rest, putting out offerings and the other things he would need on his journey even though they didn’t share a faith, looking at him one last time before covering him and sealing off this tomb, twists something in Ardyn’s heart, and he stops, locked in place for a moment, paralyzed by a hundred thoughts and images._

_There’s a trickle of light coming from a crevice in the ceiling, a single ray illuminating the interior of the tomb. The crevice runs down, widens as it approaches the floor, and Ardyn realizes that it’s the entryway to this grave. Pulled from his anguish, he rushes to it, kicking aside a bronze platter still bearing dessicated husks of whatever food had been laid on it._

_Ardyn wedges himself in the crevice, and then meets more rock. In a flurry he feels all around the surface of the stone, finding more fissures. They’re two separate rocks, he realizes, and the one he’s pressed against is sealing him in._

_It’s a door. A stone door, laid here, to keep robbers out, and now it’s keeping_ him _in, because there was that this sick twist of Ardyn’s fate could have been anticipated._

_Ardyn feels it out for a moment, runs his hands along the entire seam on either side, and then pushes, pushes with everything he has, but the stone doesn’t budge. He tries again, shoving and straining until something in him_ cracks, _and the voices sing out in joy as Ardyn feels his bones knit back together._

_Distressed, he shouts, slamming his fists against the stone, as if his sheer willpower and desire alone can crack it. His hands are bloody and tattered in minutes, fingers broken, skin scraped and gashed, but as Ardyn looks down at his ruined hands he finds them streaked with black, with ichor, and already knitting themselves back together._

_The sight sickens him, and Ardyn attacks the door, claws at it, pounds it, shouts and bellows. He sobs and begs, finally getting his voice to work as he prays over and over for a way out from this abyss, tears running down his face as his shoulders heave with each breath. The more he fights, the more damage he does to himself, and he can see the stains from the ichor on the stone, an inky black dotted with bright white where the liquid catches the light. Eventually, the flame of his fury and desperation wanes, dies down to but a flicker, and Ardyn’s blows turn to weak strikes, more of a gesture than a legitimate effort._

_Eventually, he gives in entirely, and Ardyn presses his forehead to the stone, palms flat to it. It’s rough, and cold, unforgiving and firm, and Ardyn knows it won’t move under his ministrations. He’s accepted this. He’s trapped here, but Ardyn knows he won’t die, he’ll simply... linger._

_The voices rejoice._

_Weak, exhausted, drained, unable to process anything more at this point, Ardyn slumps back, sitting a few feet away from the door. He throws his hands behind him, and one touches something cold, Ardyn flinching for a split second until he realizes it’s just the bronze platter. He takes a minute to calm himself, and then ever so slowly, more driven by curiosity and self hatred than anything else, he reaches for the platter._

_In his hands, it’s cold  and smooth, and the dust comes away with a quick wipe of the shroud, revealing the brilliant polished surface below. Ardyn shifts, settles so that he’s beneath the little sliver of light, and then braces himself, holding the platter flat, and finds it in himself to look down._

_He recoils at the sight._

_It’s horrifying, or rather, he’s horrifying. His skin is ghastly, blue-black veins dotted beneath his skin, sallow and lifeless, that of a corpse rather than a living being. The ichor is dark, so dark, beaded up and smeared at the corner of his mouth, streaked in trails down his cheeks, staining the whites of his eyes, leaving only two inhuman, golden irises that glint back at him._

_He’s a monster, and he’s done it to himself. Somnus was right to put him down._

_Or to at least try._

_Disgusted, Ardyn casts the platter away, into the darkness, and stares at the crevice and the stone door, listening as the voices crescendo into a joyous ballad._

\---

The days briefly turn into monotony.

Ardyn abandons his prospects of acting out, too afraid that Noctis will strip him further of liberties, though he’s always sorely tempted by making some sort of grandiose gesture. His boredom turns into full blown lethargy, lazing about on the flat, hard bed he’s been given, staring out at the glimpse of clouds he can see from his window, pecking lightly at whatever ration he’s been given that day. Occasionally he makes himself pace the room like a madman, just for something to _do_ , though the novelty of that wears off a few days in.

But just as Ardyn begins to settle into it, begins to accept his new norm and lean into things, they change.

He’s sprawled out on the bed, counting fissures in one of the cinderblocks, when the light in the door shifts, and Ardyn catches motion from the corner of his eye. He sits up, watching as two men approach. One is one of the nondescript guards Ardyn has seen a handful of times before, but the other... he’s new.

He’s a new face down here, but one Ardyn knows.

They stop before the glass, this man’s gaze settling on him in an eerie fashion as the guard speaks to him. Their conversation goes back and forth for a few moments, and then the guard nods and turns, walking back down the hall the way they came.

The man stays.

His stare is hard, unfeeling, and from the glint in his eye Ardyn knows this man remembers him, and for the first time since he’s been thrown in here, Ardyn is grateful for the door separating them.


	3. the stakes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: now with more stunning art gifted to me by a wonderfully talented anon.
> 
> Full versions (c/w nudity): [one](my.mixtape.moe/jrdxuk.jpg), [two.](my.mixtape.moe/jtbajk.jpg)

Ardyn hates being watched.

Libertus’ stare is unwavering, always on Ardyn, though never menacing, instead just coldly curious, a predator studying prey. Ardyn doesn’t quite feel _vulnerable,_ but he does feel uneasy, tense, like he should be readying himself, even though he’s reminded of that plate glass between them.

But the glass, though permanent, cannot always shield him; there are times when Ardyn is hauled from his cell, taken out daily for a short jaunt down the hall and a shower (under supervision, of course). There’s a method to it, a routine, one that Ardyn’s had memorized since the second time they ran him through it, consisting of a pat-down, then shackles (wrists first, ankles second), a gamut of locked doors, until they finally reach the little bathroom, the two shower heads in a row, and Ardyn is uncuffed and stripped and given a few moments under the spray and supervision.

The first time Libertus takes him, Ardyn is wary, though not nervous. He watches Libertus’ movements, even though nothing about them seems to indicate hostility, there’s still that sort of dead, cold stare to his eyes, like he’s looking at an animal going through the slaughterhouse. He can feel Libertus’ gaze on him the entire time he’s in the shower, not in a sexual way, still in the cold, calculating fashion, and for the first time in _centuries_ Ardyn finds himself a little ashamed of his nudity, defenseless without his clothing. He’s been in this skin for so long that he didn’t think that was possible anymore, but under Libertus’ watch Ardyn feels, well, truly naked.

Yet Libertus doesn’t touch him, doesn’t shove him around or put the boots to him, like the others in the past have. Maybe they were just products of their time, rougher men from a rougher time, those who hurt him and used him throughout the centuries. He’s known of Libertus for quite some time, from dossiers Drautos had collected for them. The man who watches him from a chair in the hall is slimmer, toned, hardened by years in the darkness and the extensive death he’s witnessed.

Or maybe Libertus has no intentions with him. Maybe he’s simply so jaded by it all that this is who he’s become, and Ardyn’s been misreading it the entire time.

He pushes those suspicions from his mind for the next couple days, and nothing seems particularly out of the ordinary. Libertus becomes his prime caretaker and guard, there throughout the day, from just after sunup til well after sundown, at which point Ardyn’s left alone for a few hours, though someone does come to check on him hourly. Libertus is the one to bring his rations down, the one to lead him out of his cubicle, the one to guard Ardyn and watch him in his waking hours.

It’s not so bad.

Ardyn acclimates, learns to ignore the stare. He goes on inching through the days, watching the clouds outside his window, tracing nothings in the dust on his floor.

He thinks nothing of it when Libertus comes down the following morning with his breakfast, arranged neatly on that plastic tray as it always is. Libertus approaches the door, looks down at the food, and then at Ardyn, sitting cross legged against the far wall of his cell, even with the door.

Libertus frowns.   

He crouches, and then sets the tray down, but instead of sliding it through the slat in the bottom of the door, he stops, and stands back up. Ardyn perks up slightly; he can’t grab the tray where Libertus has left it, as the slat’s too narrow to get his arm through and reach it. He watches Libertus’ shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath, and then the man turns, walking back to his chair.

He sits, looks at Ardyn, gives him a sort of pinched, tight grin. Ardyn doesn’t react.

Instead he just tips his head back to rest against the wall, chuckling softly as he stares at Libertus through the door.

\---

_Ardyn’s first weakness is thirst._

_It’s been days now since he woke up here, trapped down in this tomb, this cell. He can’t budge the door, and his body won’t fit through the crack in the ceiling, so there’s nowhere for Ardyn to go. At first he tries to pry the door open, using the cups and platters left in here with him, but they just bend and scratch when he wedges them in the fissure there. The crack in the ceiling is too high for him to try and chisel wider; he can climb up to it, but there’s no way to stay there while he chips at the stone._

_So he’s stuck. Deathless, trapped in a dusty cave, and forgotten._

_His senses are dulled, which is a blessing, really, because it takes a good six or seven days before he notices the thirst. Swallowing is painful; his throat stings the entire way, and his lips crack and ooze ichor, and Ardyn slowly realizes that his body might not be able to die, but it still has mortal wants and functions._

_So he won’t die of thirst, he’ll just lay here in agony forever._

_And so he does. He lays at the edge of his tomb, curled up half in a ball, and waits. Watches the light come and go as the days pass. Listens to the voices that echo around his head. They’re strongest when he’s weakest, when he’s tired and drained and hurt._

_The voices laugh_ at _him, never with him, and the moment his fury flares up at their mockery of him they goad him, urge him to give in to them, let them devour what’s left of him and take control. Ardyn fights them, pushes back at the swirling miasma that encroaches on him and his thoughts, his mind, his soul (what tatters remain of it)._

_They sing a sweet song promising a release from this prison. They offer him power, offer him a means to use his curse as a gift, offer him the opportunity to strike back at those who hurt him, who_ murdered _him._

_Executed, Ardyn thinks, not murdered._

_Murder is what happens to the innocent._

_And so Ardyn lies in the blackness and gloom, trying to silence the voices and remember just when it was that he lost his innocence._

_\---_

Libertus isn’t one to rush into things, it seems.

He starts small, skipping every third ration of Ardyn’s. But he’s clever, Ardyn notices, pushing the food around the plate, like Ardyn’s had it in his possession and simply found it not to his liking. Occasionally he takes a bite or two from it, further keeping up the ruse, all while Ardyn glowers from within his cell. No one will really pay any mind to a prisoner who skips a few meals now and then.

But it’s enough that Ardyn notices it, that Ardyn feels it, his stomach growling and empty.

Yet this, though, this is nothing he can’t endure. Ardyn knows from firsthand experience that he won’t starve. He takes to ignoring Libertus, especially when denied, acting like Libertus simply isn’t _there._ If the man is hoping to get a rise out of him, he’ll have to work much, much harder.

So it comes as little surprise when Libertus starts skipping every other meal. It’s still fine; Ardyn can get by on one meal a day just fine, and as far as the rest of them know, he’s still eating, he hasn’t stopped out of some act of defiance. (Inwardly, Ardyn worries a bit at just how Noctis would react to that, and he’d rather not give him an opportunity to find out.)  

The gnawing in his stomach grows fiercer, but it dies down after a week, as Ardyn adjusts to this new schedule. At this rate, he’s sure to drop a few pounds, but it won’t be enough for concern, especially as he’s not doing any kind of physical activity.

“I can’t believe you don’t like those rations they give you,” he tells Ardyn the next time he’s leading him down to the shower cubicles.

“I’ve always been a picky eater,” Ardyn fires back. Libertus chuckles darkly.

Ardyn expects Libertus to be rough with him in their brief moments of contact, but surprisingly, he isn’t. He’s detached, certainly, but he doesn’t shove Ardyn or hurry him along. Instead, he waits, hand on the dial for the shower, until Ardyn’s leisurely undressed himself and stepped in.

The dial squeaks as Libertus turns it, and Ardyn startles as cold water hits his face and shoulders. Normally it only lasts a second, but this time it lingers, and Ardyn looks at Libertus through his mess of dripping auburn hair, watching him hold the dial tilted towards the cold register. They lock eyes for a moment, and then Libertus snorts, turning it just enough to the warm register that Ardyn can stop shaking.

Ardyn turns towards the wall as he laughs to himself, the sound muffled by the spray. In all honesty, he welcomes this. Let Libertus try and fuck with him─it’s a distraction from the boredom Noctis has left him with.

When he’s finished, and Libertus cuts the water off, Ardyn turns to him with a perfectly put together grin, aloof, one he’s practiced for two millennia that says clear as day _Do your worst._

\---

_Hunger sets in at three weeks._

_It’s awful, somehow worse than the thirst. His stomach gnaws at him, using sharp teeth that send flares of pain running through his torso with each pang. At first, Ardyn eats the dessicated bits that remain of the offerings, long dried and moldy by now. He doesn’t even notice the taste, too overwhelmed by the relief that having_ something _in his stomach provides._

_Of course, the voices do._

_It’s not fated to last long, however, because he only has scraps left, and they’re gone in a few days._

_He lasts another five days before he resorts to dirt._

_It’s hard to get down, a handful of the softest soil he can find, scraped up off the floor of the tomb. He gags, his body resisting, but forces himself to get it down, if only to stop that chewing, acerbic pain for a few hours. And for a moment, it does, once he gets it all down._

_But then it makes the pain in his gut a dozen times worse, stabbing, twisting pangs, and he’s unable to do anything but lie there wracked in anguish, sobbing on the floor, though there are no tears, just a few drops of ichor that stain his lashes, all his corpse can afford._

_After hours, they pass, and he’s left to lie in the quiet again._

_He can’t go on like this, though. He knows it. He’s already half insane from the darkness and the tightness of this space, and the hunger is just inching him further and further along, pulled in by those voices. That void frightens him, the point when he can’t fight them anymore, and he has to let them in, let them take over, and Ardyn is determined to do anything he can to prevent that._

_And so, he finds the smallest serving dish of the bunch he’s been left with. It’s narrow and elongated, and small enough that Ardyn can wrap his fist almost all around it._

_It takes him a day and a half to sharpen the rounded edge. He drags the one side of the dish against the stone wall of the tomb, scrapes it over and over against the rock, until the rounded piping chips and scratches, wears down into a thin, sharp edge. And even after it’s sharp enough to cut his thumb, Ardyn spends a good time sharpening it further, unwilling to face the decision he’s pushed himself towards._

_Eventually, the hunger pangs wrack his whole torso with their severity, and Ardyn stops. Panting, he sits in the darkness of his tomb, legs outstretched before him, fingers shaking as he tries to grip his makeshift knife. The voices scream, mocking him, shrieking in delight at how far he’s fallen, and Ardyn hates every word they hurl at him._

_He can’t do this._

_He has to do this._

_Will it even work? He recalls how his hands and ankles healed themselves, left scars in their wake but_ healed, _instantly, the moment he removed the nails, how his fingers and knuckles knit themselves back together as he scratched at the door, how his thumb sealed itself the moment he pulled the knife. This has to work, won’t it?_

_His stomach roils. There’s only one way to find out._

_Ardyn lays one hand over his knee, and the other holding the knife presses the tip to the soft muscle that attaches just above his knee. Ardyn knows all of these sorts of muscles, where they attach, how they overlay one another, and he can feel just where his own begins._

_His head spins. He braces himself, digs the knife in. Just a small cut, he tells himself._

_It takes him another long moment until he can finally muster the strength to apply enough pressure to cut through his skin. It’s tough at first─he’s thinner now, losing weight the longer he wastes away down here, and the muscle is no longer as pronounced as it once was─but it eases the moment his knife pierces through his skin, diving down into the layers of fat and muscle beneath. His sense of pain is so dulled that he doesn’t really feel anything for a moment, his mind too preoccupied with his imminent hunger to process the wound in his leg._

_Instantly, dark blood─is it ichor or blood?─spills forth, hot over Ardyn’s fingers as he holds his leg down. It doesn’t deter him, and he keeps cutting, moving the knife back to leave an incision about the length of a finger. Swallowing thickly, he reaffirms his grip on the knife, and then draws it out of the wound, moving the tip back to the top of the incision, driving it in just to the right of the cut he’s made._

_This time, he cuts at an angle, hooked inwards, and the pain is sharper, greater, to the point where he has to stop halfway through to gather himself, the voices a cacophony of pure delight, laughing all around him. He takes a breath, grits his teeth, and then cuts the rest of the way, but the segment doesn’t quite come free yet. Grimacing, grunting in pain, he angles the knife further in, and cuts again, whimpering as he slices through the muscle and connective tissues there._

_It takes some work, but he gets it free, severing the last of the bits of skin and fat that hold it in place. His fingers, now covered in his own ichor-blood, struggle to hold it as he pulls it from the wound, slippery and soft. He’s shaking now, both from the pain, the hunger, and from the realization of what he’s_ done, _how low he’s now stooped, cutting morsels from his own body._

_His shoulders are heaving with sobs that threaten to escape as he stares at it, this lump in his hand, and then looks down to the wound in his leg, slowly filling in and sealing shut. He knows he should find no comfort in the fact that this_ worked, _but in the back of his mind there’s an odd sort of relief that briefly springs up, only to be washed away by the greater horror that always comes with thoughts of his new state._

_His passengers give him no peace, no respite, their chorus of glee at his despair and shame. They revel in the depths that he’s sunken to, relish in his suffering, and then urge him on, urge him to embrace what he has done and to take that next step further._

_That horror of it all isn’t enough to stop him, however, and Ardyn shuts his eyes as he shoves that strip into his mouth, hardly bothering to chew before he forces himself to swallow, shutting out the realization that he’s mutilated himself, now eating himself, his own flesh, just to sate his hunger for a brief moment. He gags, clasping one blood-coated hand to his mouth to keep it shut, retching and breathing roughly through his nose as he fights the imperative urge to vomit up what he’s just swallowed._

_He paid a price for this; he’ll see it through._

_Eventually, the urge passes, and then, shockingly, so does the hunger, abating ever so slowly. It doesn’t vanish entirely, but rather dies down to a dull roar, one that he can easily ignore by now, so conditioned to far, far worse. Emboldened, even as his conscience screams for him to stop, Ardyn cuts another strip, twice as long this time, letting out a hoarse, dry scream as he digs the knife in beside the healing wound he’s already left beside his leg._

_This one is harder to get down, Ardyn having to tear it into pieces with his teeth, fighting that urge to vomit at the texture and taste the entire time, blood smearing over his lips and chin. But he gets it down, heaving, shoulders rocking with each breath, staring down at the two gashes in his leg to ground himself, both sealing up and filling in now._

_He wipes away a smear of blood over the smaller one, noting how it leaves no scar in its wake. Curious, he thinks, as his stomach roils, sated with a taboo treat. The larger one is still healing, and will no doubt take longer, and Ardyn sets his bloody makeshift knife down in the dirt beside him, leaning against the wall._

_He can’t do this again. He can’t spend an eternity hacking pieces off himself._

_He needs to get out of this place._

_\---_

Perhaps, Ardyn muses, he shouldn’t have welcomed the challenge.

Two days later Libertus stops feeding him entirely. Ardyn acts aloof and indifferent each time he sets the tray down outside the door, a cat displeased with his owner’s offerings. Inwardly, however, he’s full of simmering rage and hunger, wishing he could just break down the glass in the door and take what’s his, meager as it is.

And below that rage is fear, of course.

Noctis won’t hesitate to restrain Ardyn to keep him alive and prolong his suffering, to strip him of what little liberties he has should they threaten his place among the living. And while Ardyn knows he can _endure,_ he has no desire to suffer any more indignities in such a fashion, not at this point, not in this mortal body.

Although he won’t admit it, not even to himself in his private thoughts, Ardyn _is_ afraid of such a fate. Dying doesn’t frighten him; it hasn’t for centuries, the same with pain, but the thought of being trapped and kept alive, as he was for so long... That chills him.

His stomach growls and hisses as the days wear on, with nothing to fill it. It’s an ache that’s too familiar to him, that dredges up a slew of memories across eras and continents.

Ardyn supposes he could beg Libertus. Plead with him, offer him something in return─sexual favors, most likely, as Ardyn has nothing else to bargain with. He wonders how successful such a ploy would be; it hardly seems economical for Libertus to have this grand scheme for something he could ostensibly take easily from Ardyn, so perhaps that’s not his desire.

He debates trying for three days as the fatigue and hunger truly eases in, and on the morning of the fourth day, he makes up his mind. Everything is a gamble, Ardyn reasons, and in his situation, there are three outcomes: either things get better, they stay the same, or they get worse.

_The same or better,_ he tells himself as Libertus approaches that morning. Ardyn rakes his hair back from his face, standing and leaning against the far wall of his cell, facing the door, a bird preening himself. He makes eye contact with Libertus, tilts his head just a bit as the man approaches his usual chair and stops, giving Ardyn a once over. Ardyn gives the slightest of grins.

He points to the door, and then gestures between them, pointing first to himself and then to Libertus, several times in quick succession. To make his point just a little clearer, he exaggeratedly mouths the words _you and me,_ and punctuates it again with another smile.

Libertus hesitates. His gaze turns bemused and a bit cocky, laughing once to himself as he steps around the chair and approaches the door to Ardyn’s cell. The lock is two parts─a fingerprint scan and a key─and it takes Libertus a moment to do both parts, before it clicks loudly, the tumblers retracting, and then Libertus pushes the door open.

He doesn’t step inside, however, still just sizing Ardyn up, assessing if there’s any real danger here, and Ardyn’s heart quickens in his chest. He can hear his pulse in his ears, and his eyes settle on the knife tucked into Libertus’ belt, as well as the stun baton and handcuffs beside it.

“What do you need, ginger snap?” he says, arms resting at his sides as he takes one step into the cell.

“I think we need to address whatever’s going on,” Ardyn says, voice smooth, and Libertus chuckles darkly, almost cruelly, a sound that Ardyn’s heard before, from different men in different cages. “You want something from me, don’t you?”

“Do I?” Libertus takes another step in, hooking his thumbs into his belt, and then stops, midway into the cell, a few feet from Ardyn now. He blinks, purses his lips slightly, and glances over Ardyn, from head to toe.

“You do,” Ardyn clarifies, and detaches himself from the wall. He closes the space between them, and then slowly sinks to his knees. There’s no shame in this for him, not anymore; he’s been used and thrown aside so many times all of the memories blur together in his mind. Better that this be on his terms, to get him something that he wants, no, _needs,_ than being forced to be the object of someone’s amusement.

Ardyn flicks his gaze up to Libertus’ face, searching for any kind of response, any kind of indicator that he’s been right in his assumption, but Libertus offers none, just sets his jaw slightly. Lightly, Ardyn places his hands on Libertus’ hips, makes his intention clear as he inches his fingers towards the zip on Libertus’ pants.

For a brief second, he thinks of going for the knife, but he’d have to be fast, so fast, and he doesn’t trust himself as tired and weak as he is. Libertus would overpower him, pin him down and disarm him before he even had a real chance.

“And I think, if I give you this, if I give you what you want, things can go back to normal, can’t they?” he purred, lightly hooking his fingers into the waist of Libertus’ pants. He licks his lips, waiting, mouth slightly parted.

Libertus just stares down at him, hard, for a long second, and his expression is entirely unreadable. Eventually he snorts, and then chuckles, reaching down and grasping Ardyn’s wrists. Before Ardyn can really even process what’s happening, Libertus steps around him, pulling Ardyn off balance as he drags his arm over towards his bed.

There’s a sharp metallic _click,_ and Ardyn cranes his neck, twisting, watching as Libertus snaps one of the handcuffs around his wrist. He tries to tug away as the second is hooked through the metal frame of his bed, enclosing one of the steel slats of the headboard, and Ardyn’s blood is thundering in his ears.

“You keep thinking about what I want,” Libertus says, stepping back, and Ardyn furiously tugs at the cuff, the metal ring jangling around the slat. His stomach is in knots, and he tries to keep the panic off his face, glaring at Libertus as he backs out of the room.

“Don’t tug too hard on that, now,” Libertus chides, gesturing to the cuff. “Wouldn’t want anyone on staff to ask questions about that. They might get the wrong idea, think maybe you’re hurting yourself.”

Ardyn’s breath comes in quick, shallow pants as Libertus shuts the door, the tumblers locking once more. Furious and uneasy, he turns, puts his back to the door and Libertus, and fiddles with the cuff. His hand is too big to get through it, though Ardyn tries, pressing his thumb in to his palm and trying to back it through the cuff. He searches the bed, looks for any fault in the welding, any way to get the cuff off, but there’s none.

He’s tethered to the bed, until Libertus chooses to let him out. Ardyn crosses his legs, sitting, cuffed hand and arm resting on the mattress, the other in his lap.

Sighing, Ardyn realizes he has little choice but to sit here. And so he does. He leans his head against his arm, looks up at the window, and watches the clouds drift by, fingers idly tracing the links in the chains of his cuff.

\---

_Ardyn redoubles his efforts to escape._

_He knows of the crack in the ceiling, and Ardyn makes a renewed effort to get to it, clambering up the sides and trying to reach the center of the ceiling. He makes it a few times, hooks an arm through, but the crack isn’t wide enough to get his torso and head through, and he can’t widen it._

_From how wide the chamber is, he wonders if there might be another way, and he spends hours combing all of the walls, running over them with his fingers, feeling for a gap, a tremor, a waver in the air. The light is too low to find any potential recesses by sight, so he does it all by touch, slowly and thoroughly. Half a day’s work yields nothing, and as the sun goes down, Ardyn continues, running his hands over every nook and cranny of his tomb._

_He continues on in total darkness._

_It’s the dead of night when he finally finds something, reaching as high as he can, his fingers finding a hollow that extends beyond his reach. Ardyn secures a handhold, hauls his bag of bones up, and reaches deeper, deeper, finding no end._

_Leaning on the wall, holding himself there with one arm, Ardyn hesitates. He can’t even see down this hollow in the darkness; the only thing that catches any light is the lip, the slight edge leading in to the crevice. It’s wide enough that Ardyn knows he can get his body into it, and if he holds his hand still he can feel the air move around it._

_It leads out, he supposes, or at least to somewhere larger, but how far that takes him, how many twists and turns... that he cannot know._

_The voices laugh at him, ridicule him for his hesitation. He’s deathless, no mortal coil can bind him, so what does he have to lose?_

_Ardyn looks back into his tomb, at the few golden dishes catching the meager moonlight, his improvised knife among them, still matted with his own blood. These comforts are at risk, he supposes, the security of what he knows, but beyond that... what he stands to gain is far greater._

_With great effort he manages to haul himself up to the lip, torso shoved down the hollow. It’s still wide enough for him to proceed, and so Ardyn does, inching himself in, bit by bit, letting the rock encase him. He keeps one arm tucked close to him, the other outstretched, feeling where he cannot see as he moves forward, scraping himself along the stone._

_He’s barely inside when the panic sets in, the total darkness and the feeling of stone all around him, so tight that he can’t really even roll over. He’s trapped on his stomach, forced to move forward, not sure if he can even go backwards now, and dread sets in, tingling across his skin, a thousand tiny needles jabbing at him._

_He won’t be alone, the voices tell him. He always has them._

_Ardyn crawls onwards. He made it in here, he’ll figure out how to go back if he needs to._

_After what feels like eternity, moving at a snail’s pace (is he going upwards or is that his mind playing tricks on him?), the tunnel seems to widen a bit. Ardyn feels about, casts his arm in all directions, noting that the floor slopes slightly down, the ceiling slightly upwards._

_Encouraged, a smile on his face in the utter darkness, Ardyn reaches his other arm forward and pulls himself, pushing with one leg. The cavern does open, he realizes, and then it’s too late, and he’s sliding forward, down, unable to stop himself, arms outstretched as he frantically attempts to brace himself. It’s just a slip of a few feet, maybe the length of a man’s body, but now Ardyn is hanging vertically, his feet above his head, shoulder caught on a protrusion of the rock._

_It takes a moment for everything to settle. He’s dangling there, upside down, caught by his shoulder and one foot, in a passage so narrow he can barely move his arms along his body._

_It’s less than a minute before he begins to sob._

_His head is spinning, and he tries to collect himself. Think rationally, he urges himself, shutting out the voices. What would Somnus do? Gilgamesh?_

_Neither of them would have been stupid enough to get themselves stuck in this situation in the first place─_

_Ardyn takes a few long, deep breaths, gathers whatever meager strength he has. He shoves his hands upwards, towards his head, ignoring how they catch and scrape and snag on the rock, instead feeling around for something to push off of. One hand manages to get a bit of a handhold, but the other just reaches down into the narrow abyss, finding no surface. It’s too tight for him to fall in there, but Ardyn fears slipping further and getting his head stuck there._

_Carefully, he gathers his strength, and pushes. It’s a vain effort. He moves an inch and then immediately slides back down, shoulder resting on the little outcropping._

_Ardyn tries to stave off another wave of panic by thinking of a new solution. If he braces himself against the wall, maybe he can inch himself down to the opening, and so Ardyn shifts his hands, draws them to his shoulders and forces his back entirely flush with the tight passage._

_It’s excruciating, but he manages to back out somewhat, up to his knees, when his feet touch stone─the ceiling. He can’t bend his legs like this, there’s not enough room, and they’d break, but Ardyn tries it anyway, bends them, keeps shoving, trying to curl at the waist. Eventually he can go no further, jammed in there, and his hands slip on the wall, sending him tumbling back down into the crevice._

_This time, Ardyn has no fight._

_He hangs in the darkness, one arm thrown above him, cast into that narrow space, and sobs, what few tears he can conjure running up. All too soon his head spins, stars appearing before his eyes, beautiful multi colored swirls and shapes, and it’s suddenly hard to breathe, everything pushing down on his chest. The voices still talk to him, still mock him for all of this, but their cadence now feels like a lullaby and not a cacophony._

_Ardyn remembers being up on that cross, a memory that feels a lifetime ago (because it was, he thinks darkly, one of his last rational thoughts), remembers looking down in shame at the crowd, searching for the face of his brother, wishing that Somnus would just take him off this cross._

_Somnus wasn’t there then, and he’s not here now._

_There’s no one here but him and the passengers stuck within his skull._

_Ardyn sputters for a bit, and then his world spirals off, letting him drift into a different sort of blackness._

_\---_

Ardyn’s used to waiting.

By the time night falls, Ardyn flops into his bed, one hand still pulled up near the slats, resting as low as he can get it given the short reach of the cuffs. But at least he’s comfortable here, able to lie down and take the ache off his knees.

He sits up when Libertus goes to leave, perhaps a little too eager, a dog penned in the yard watching his master walk away while he whimpers sadly. But Libertus just stops and looks and considers for a second, a mere split second (that’s all Ardyn’s worth, apparently, but is that better or worse than nothing?), before he continues on at his brisk pace.

And so Ardyn spends the next several hours laying on his bed and staring at the wall, thinking about everything and nothing. He dozes a bit, roused by the increasingly uncomfortable pressure between his legs, and for a moment he forgets, still caught in the nebulous fog of sleep, and tries to stand to take those few steps to the toilet on the other side of the cell.

His wrist catches instantly, before he’s even made it a full step, and the realization comes crashing in. He looks to the dark hallway, realizes that _no one_ will be by for hours, the embarrassment and the shame creeping in as he sits on the floor beside his bed, furious that just a space of a few feet has reduced him to this.

It goes from discomfort to agony in a short while, and Ardyn holds out as long as he can before he lets go, angry at himself, furiously tugging at his wrist and the cuff until his already bruised skin breaks in several spots. Hunched over, kneeling beside his bed, Ardyn bites back wave after wave of emotion, everything from resentment to fury to fear, until the roulette wheel finally stops once more on humiliation.

He feels utterly helpless and angry for it, all agency stripped from him, left to sit in his shame for hours.

Libertus finds him still on the floor the next morning, and his disgust is palpable, but there’s a hard edge to it, one that clearly takes glee in Ardyn’s disgrace. “Look at you,” he snarls, shaking his head as he undoes the cuff from the bed slat, but not Ardyn’s wrist. “Fucking disgusting. Just like a goddamn animal.”

Ardyn doesn’t protest, just sullenly glares as Libertus pulls him to his feet. For a moment he wonders if Libertus will hold him down in it, like he’s a dog, a family pet to be housebroken and reminded of his failures, but instead Libertus just shoves him from the room, so hard Ardyn stumbles.

He doesn’t bother with the cuffs as he hauls Ardyn down the hall, and Ardyn doesn’t fight, all too aware of the stun baton on his belt. Instead he goes, trying not to trip over his own feet, his legs numb and uncoordinated after kneeling for so long.

“Strip,” Libertus orders the moment they’re in the showers.

Ardyn does, the cuff jangling about on his wrist, jewelry that hangs not as adornment but as a warning. The moment the last of his soiled garments are free, Libertus hauls him by the arm and shoulder into the cubicle, clipping the other end of the cuff to the showerhead mounted just above his head.

He steps back, looking over Ardyn, and his gaze is hard, so hard, as if he’s trying to take Ardyn apart piece by piece. For his part, Ardyn keeps his back straight and his face neutral, jaw set, teeth locked together, fingers curled into a loose fist at his side in anticipation. The tile under his feet is cold, and the anticipation hangs about the room like a static charge in the air, humming loudly before the inevitable lightning strike.

Ardyn still yelps when Libertus turns the cold tap on. He leaves it square in the cold register, lets it sit in that frigid territory, and watches Ardyn twist and try and pull away from the spray, locked there by the cuff. He’s shaking in under a minute, the water so cold it feels like he’s been thrown into ice, and Ardyn’s mind is reeling, still caught up in how new and powerful these mortal sensations are.

Libertus watches him until Ardyn gives up struggling and curls in on himself, free arm thrown over his stomach while he hunches as much as possible, teeth chattering. And then he backs away, blase, disappearing into the hallway as Ardyn shouts at him.

He must only be gone for a few minutes, but to Ardyn, it feels like hours. Everything boils down to just the cold on his skin, seeping into him, down into his very bones, to how he wants to collapse and roll into a ball to conserve what little heat is left in him, but he _can’t,_ forced to endure as he is, locked in place by a few inches of steel.

By the time Libertus returns, Ardyn’s so cold he can’t find it in him to shake anymore, so drained he can do little but stand there, legs weak, his head drooping between his shoulders, wet tangle of auburn hair plastered to his forehead. He keeps his one arm thrown over his chest, the only thing he can do to conserve any heat, fingers digging fiercely into his own side, the only tether he has in this moment.

“You all clean?” Libertus asks, like there’s nothing abnormal at all about this situation. “I think maybe you could go a bit longer.”

Libertus lets him stand there a few minutes longer, and although his face is perfectly neutral Ardyn knows he’s relishing in the sight. He can see that glint in his eye, the only betrayal on his face, so minute it’s easily missed but one that shines like a lighthouse on a dark ocean for Ardyn.

Ardyn tucks his head into his chest as Libertus shuts the spray off, his soggy hair forming a curtain around his face, shielding him as Libertus stomps in. He feels rough hands on his arm, can see Libertus’ boots occupying the sliver of floor he can see, and hears the _click_ of the cuff being undone, and then Libertus lets him stand there for a moment, a dripping mess, Ardyn curling his other arm over his stomach. He doesn’t have it in him to hide his nudity, so far withdrawn that he barely feels like he’s inhabiting this skin anymore.

It all comes crashing back in when Libertus hauls him from the stall and shoves him into the hallway, still soaking, and Ardyn trips and stumbles, knees hitting the wet tile. There’s no towel, not even a moment to wick the water off his skin, and Libertus descends on him, grabbing a fistful of his hair to pull him back to his feet. Ardyn scrabbles, pushing himself up with his hands, the pain in his scalp new, different than the stabbing ache of the cold. This is sharp and hot, like the lash of a whip, and he can still feel it stinging as Libertus gets him into the cell.

This time, Libertus clips him to the pipes at the back wall, far enough that Ardyn can’t reach the bed, can’t pull away the thin blanket he has there for any kind of comfort or modesty. Ardyn’s too preoccupied with shivering and dripping onto the floor to really process as Libertus fastens his cuff to one of the brackets holding the pipes to the wall, bracing himself for another blow, another bout of humiliation, using all of his energy to just stay alert, but the moment the cuff snaps shut Ardyn lets all the factors sink in.

“My clothes,” he stammers, looking up at Libertus, shoving a clump of his hair out of his face.

“Animals don’t wear clothes, last I checked,” Libertus replies, bland, like it’s a fact from a textbook.

He tugs on the cuff, makes sure it’s secure, and then backs out of the cell, kicking the door shut before approaching his chair. Ardyn looks down at the floor, letting his hair fall back into his face and cut him off from all this reality. He can’t bear to see his reflection now, naked in the center of this room after he _soiled_ himself, his lips undoubtedly purple from the cold, hair a tangled, sopping wet mess.

From the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of Libertus, just his legs, walking back towards the door. Ardyn freezes, locked up, braced, but all Libertus does is kneel and set the tray with Ardyn’s morning ration on it, just outside the door.

Ardyn takes a shaky breath, wadding both hands into fists.

He can endure, he tells himself. _This is nothing._

\---

_Ardyn meanders between this life and the next for days._

_He’s not sure how long he lives each time, until his head spins too severely and breathing becomes an impossible task, but he’d guess a few hours, judging from what he knows of crucifixion, especially done upside down. At first, he tries to count his visits to the banks of the River, but he loses track after five, maybe six times. It’s hard to distinguish just when he returns to his body, as the blackness is so all encompassing, and it’s often not till he feels the stone digging into some part of him, his shoulder, his head, that he’s really aware he’s returned._

_He flies through a myriad of emotions each time. Anger, sadness, joy upon reaching the banks of the River and getting a few moments of respite, disappointment when he’s returned to his mortal frame in this sarcophagus, dread when he realizes it’s going to keep happening._

_The voices greet him every time he returns, however, like he’s an old friend welcomed back into the fold. Strangely it’s comforting, at least, to not be totally alone in this prison, though Ardyn could easily think of far better company._

_His other mortal senses are still well and active. Hunger, thirst, all of it, eating at him when he’s awake, until death creeps up on him once more. It’s torture, really, a wheel that keeps turning, tossing him between the living and the dead._

_Every time he wakes, the voices promise to help him._

_Give in, they say, and we can take you from this._

_Control over his form, his body, his soul, is all Ardyn has left at this point. Surrendering it is everything._

_Ardyn_ can’t.

_He makes more efforts to get out, breaks various bones in his body, scrapes himself up trying to ease forward or backward in the tunnel. It’s all in vain. Just like he’s trapped among the living, he’s trapped here._

_Ardyn dies and wakes a handful of times as he ponders their offer._

_He’s made terrible decisions to get himself here, he realizes._

_What’s one more?_

_He considers it all as he sits on the banks of the River, looking at the torchlight of the boats crossing it, orange and white dancing over the blue-black surface, remembering what color and the waking world looked like, relishing it all of the few moments he’s there until he’s returned to the black stone wall snugly holding his body._

_In another moment, he’s back, stone cutting into his shoulder, blackness and rock all around him, and Ardyn remembers that firelight on the water._

_I accept, he thinks, lips forming the words in the darkness._

_He shuts his eyes (not that it matters, the blackness is the same) and lets go, feels his walls crumble, feels those voices turn into **presences** within him, a swirling, dark mass that rushes through him, sweeping him away, flooding him and pulling him under and─_

_Ardyn wakes to sunlight._

_There’s grass beneath him, not stone, soft grass, itchy where it touches his skin. Above him, nothing, just a gentle breeze and the heat of the sun on his skin._

_He sobs._

_It’s ugly and unrestrained, an animalistic noise, raw and primal, Ardyn twisting in the grass as he sobs in both relief and in fear. His euphoria at being free from the tomb, from the crevice, all of it is tinged by that lingering darkness he can feel in the back of his mind, the **presence** there, crackling with power, one that he doesn’t think he can fight._

_Whatever it is, it’s freed him, carried him from that cavern and deposited him on this patch of grass,and for that, Ardyn is infinitely grateful. He’s shaking, eyes open, drinking in all of the light and the sight of the sky and the trees nearby and the grass around him, all of it so welcome after weeks of nothingness._

_He feels that presence shift, push forth, a chill overtaking him._

_We are one now, it says. Bound together. Entwined forever._

_Ardyn recoils, pulling his arms in, freezing despite the sunlight around him. The voices, the crowd inside him, coos and shushes him, and somehow that makes it all the worse._

_Don’t fear it, they tell him. We grant you power, power like you could never dream of._

_Don’t hate us._

_Use us._

_The chill vanishes, the warmth tingling over Ardyn’s skin once more, and he reaches out to his sides, gripping the grass. It’s real, he knows, but there’s something reassuring about the tactile sensation of it against his fingertips._

_He’s made this deal, given up a part of himself for this. He paid a price, though how high of one he doesn’t know yet, but he doesn’t want what he’s acquired now._

_Use us, they say, and Ardyn feels that shock run through him, raw, like liquid metal in his veins._

_Ardyn swallows, staring up at the limitless sky._

\---

Under it all, Ardyn wonders if he really is an animal.

He’s sitting naked and snared on the floor of what, for all intents and purposes, is a glorified pen, fed twice a day from the hands of his masters, denied socialization and interaction. He’s even hosed down like one, not granted any real dignities.

He’s seen what lengths animals will go to when trapped.

Ardyn considers it. He doesn’t know how much he trusts his healing now; fixing broken bones was one matter, but reattaching a limb is infinitely more complex. After debate, he elects to wait until things worsen, and then he’ll resort to it, if just to show Libertus that he’s not quite so docile and powerless in this situation.

Libertus lets him sit until the afternoon, when Ardyn’s hair has dried into a tangled mess and the sun is bearing down fully through his window, and then he enters the cell, a fresh set of scrubs in hand. Notably absent are shoes, but Ardyn doesn’t question it, doesn’t say a word as Libertus unlocks the cuffs, releasing Ardyn’s wrist.

He sits and waits, nursing his bruised and cut wrist, and only when Libertus leaves the cell does he dress himself, wondering if Libertus will read that as a sign that Ardyn’s playing in to his schemes. Ardyn supposes he doesn’t care, either way.

Libertus does the whole rigmarole with Ardyn’s evening ration, leaving it just outside his door, letting it sit for what Ardyn would guess is the better part of an hour. Eventually he comes to collect it, sauntering off, and when he returns, he’s carrying the thick wrist and ankle shackles, the kind used for normal trips outside Ardyn’s cell.

Dread settles in the pit of Ardyn’s stomach as Libertus opens the door. It can’t be good if they’re coming to get him this late, with no warning.

“Come on, ginger snap,” he says, and Ardyn rises from his bed, holds his wrists out and lets Libertus fasten the cuffs on them and then on his ankles.

He wants to ask where they’re going as Libertus leads him out of the cell, walking behind him, one hand on Ardyn’s shoulder, but Ardyn knows he’ll see soon enough, and there’s no sense asking something that could risk Libertus lashing out at him. So instead he plods along, barefoot, through the basement of the Citadel, until Libertus stops him at one gray steel door with a narrow, vertical window in it.

Inside, all Ardyn can see is a chair, half-reclined, like an examination chair, with blue padding and thick straps on the arm and leg rests, and one at the top. He’s busy formulating the million and one possibilities of what’s about to happen in this room as Libertus leads him inside, and only then does Ardyn notice the other occupants.

Ignis, Hand to the King, stands beside Luna, his sightless eyes fixated on the opposite wall. Luna looks at Ardyn, but Ignis doesn’t, and Ardyn wonders if he would do the same even if he were sighted. Luna’s face is wrought with concern, and that unsettles Ardyn further, even though he knows her to be a bit of a sensitive, soft soul.

The third body in the room is a doctor, someone faceless, busy tending to tools on a metal rolling cart, and the sight of all this brings back memories for Ardyn, of years spent under fluorescent lights in the back rooms of forgotten facilities in Gralea.

The shackles are undone, and Ignis looks at him for the first time, in his general direction. Luna’s gaze falls to his wrist, bloody and scabbed and bruised, and Ardyn pulls it into his side, hiding it against the folds of his scrubs.

“You’re sure about this?” Luna asks, and she looks briefly to Ignis, who keeps his dead gaze locked on the far wall.

“Of course, My Lady,” comes the smooth reply.

He goes willingly into the chair─no sense fighting now, not with all of them here, and as they strap him in he takes stock of what’s on that cart. A funnel, a length of thin rubber tubing, a hard metal straw of sorts, a pouch, a couple of shunts...

Ardyn snorts to himself, lifting his gaze up to the ceiling tiles as he puts it together. He knew it would catch up to him, the meals, Libertus skipping all of them, leaving them untouched. They think he’s on a hunger strike, because how are they to know any better? Ardyn can’t correct them, here and now; it’ll be read as a ploy to shift blame, and who will they believe, the monster they’ve locked away in a closet, or the brave soldier they’ve left to guard him?

Ardyn tips his head back as they do the strap across his forehead to keep him in place. He can still see Luna and Ignis, Libertus on the other side of him, close, ready to help out.

“Hold him, please,” the doctor says, and as he turns to Ardyn he’s holding the metal straw.

Libertus grabs his jaw, too rough, and Ardyn hopes that maybe Lady Luna notes that, but he doesn’t fight, sighing and counting the tiles on the ceiling as he waits that brief moment. The hollow straw is shoved into his nose, pushed up and back until it meets resistance, and Ardyn grimaces, tears springing to his eyes. He keeps still as the doctor twists it, and then pushes, something _cracking_ in Ardyn’s face, and he yelps, arms straining against their bonds. It _hurts,_ and the proximity to his eyes makes them tear up like faucets, Libertus’ fingers and thumb clawing at his jaw as he tries to keep still, the doctor twisting this straw further into his nose. He’s not surprised when blood curls around his nostril and runs onto his lip, catching at the corner of his mouth before scampering down over his chin.

After a moment it’s over, and the doctor steps back to pick up the tubing, feeding it through the straw and up into Ardyn’s sinus, and then he feels it hit the back of his throat, going down. He gags and coughs, as much as he can with Libertus’ hand on his mouth, and then something touches his throat and he _swallows,_ involuntarily, the tubing caught in his throat.

He sputters and swallows again, tries to cough but the tubing won’t slip free, until finally it moves past, further down, and Ardyn can feel it each and every time he swallows. At that point Libertus lets go of Ardyn’s jaw, and the doctor turns to retrieve the pouch and one of the shunts.

“Is it always so... rough?” Luna asks, and her tone expresses clear discomfort, but not pity. Ardyn pries his eyes open and looks up at the tiles again, counting the seconds until this ordeal is finished.

“We can sedate him next time, if you prefer,” the doctor replies, and Ignis scoffs.

“That won’t be necessary,” he comments, and Ardyn blinks wearily.

The shunt is hooked up to the pouch and the tubing a moment later, and then the doctor holds the pouch up a bit, giving it a gentle squeeze to get things really flowing. Ardyn can feel the liquid in the tube, running down his throat and then settling in his stomach. It’s cold, and his stomach roils, given sustenance after weeks without, and Ardyn makes a choked noise of discomfort, Luna flinching in response.

He keeps counting seconds until the pouch is empty, the doctor rolling it to get the last few bits of liquid out, giving the tubing a few squeezes along the way too. Ardyn swallows, panting as the doctor slowly starts to pull it from him, the feeling alien and horribly uncomfortable. His stomach churns and cramps, and he coughs again as they pull the tubing through his throat, Ardyn sighing in relief when they finally get it free of the straw.

The straw itself is pulled free none too gently thereafter, and Ardyn tries to tip his head forward as he feels the rush of blood follow in his wake, attempting to reach up with his bound hand, but he can’t, and he’s left to sit there helplessly as it streams from his nostril over his lips and chin, dripping onto his shirt. Some flows back down his throat, following the path the tubing had, and Ardyn can taste it as he swallows.

“Oh my,” Luna says, with a little gasp, and from the corner of his eye Ardyn sees her raise her hand to her mouth.

“That, ah... That sometimes... happens...” the doctor says, trailing off, looking to Ignis and Luna.

Ignis nudges Luna, and she looks to him for a moment, startled. “I─ Oh. He’s, um, bleeding. From the nose,” she supplies, and Ignis nods.

“Disregard it,” Ignis says, and the doctor nods his acceptance. “How often will he require this?”

“We recommend three times a day, once every eight hours,” the doctor replies. “But you could go with twice a day.”

“We’ll follow your recommendation,” Ignis says, with a curt nod. Luna wrings her hands together, but Ignis turns her away from the sight of Ardyn, urging her towards the door, and a moment later it clicks shut in their wake.

The doctor follows a moment later, scampering away as if he’s been chastised, and then Ardyn is once more alone with Libertus, his steadfast companion. He focuses on breathing, on the blood running down his chin as Libertus undoes the strap on his forehead, and then Ardyn tries to lean his head forward, to get the blood to stop draining down the back of his throat.

Jaded, he looks up at Libertus, who is utterly unmoved and also unexcited by the sight before him. He moves down to undo the straps on Ardyn’s ankles.

As he stands back up to undo the ones on Ardyn’s wrists, Ardyn opens his mouth to speak, licking the blood off his lips first.

“Whatever you want,” he says, voice soft and raspy, vulnerable, “I’ll give it to you.”

He doesn’t mean a word of it.

Libertus purses his lips and nods, as if considering. He pats Ardyn’s forearm like he’s an old friend, years of history between them (and there is, Ardyn supposes, though not so directly), and then reaches for the strap. “In time, ginger snap.”

Ardyn hates that answer.

He feels beaten, really, for a slew of reasons he can't articulate. Libertus has not only deprived him, starved him, he's now heaped more suffering onto him with this, and with the suspicion of his behavior. Ardyn has nothing at his disposal to fight back with, especially if he doesn't know what Libertus wants from him in the first place.

He doesn’t say anything further, just lets Libertus pull the straps away and fasten the shackles back on him, march him down the hallway and deposit him once more in his cell.

Inside, alone with his thoughts, Ardyn raises his hands to wipe away the last bits of tears clinging to his lashes, and then covers his mouth and nose, presses his fingers there as he fixes the damage to heaven knows what in his face. They come away bloody, tacky, and Ardyn looks at them, at how _red_ his blood is, even dried down to a matte, dark crimson.

Libertus won’t beat him.

He survived the Scourge, survived the Six scheming against him.

He’ll give himself this moment to lament it all, and then he’ll rally, he’ll plan, he’ll figure out how to get two steps ahead of Libertus once more.


End file.
